A musical journey back to North Minneapolis
When you grow up with a 10-piece soul band practicing in the basement, you don’t get out of that house without having music be part of your destiny.
A path was set at the feet of saxophonist Geoffrey Lamar Wilson, whose skills as a boy allowed him to answer the occasional call to sit in with his father’s band.
Wilson, who grew up in North Minneapolis and Golden Valley, is a seasoned musician and composer. The road traveled has been full of life lessons, musical reinvention and serendipity. After earning a degree in jazz saxophone, Wilson moved to New York City, where he formed a band with classmates and his now wife, Hannah Jensen.
The band had a five-year run and, near the end, Wilson took jobs scoring online commercials, teaching himself how to write quick clips of music.
A fateful wedding gig for friends a couple of years earlier led to him composing and recording music for podcasts. His first was for the hit show Terrible, Thanks for Asking with Nora McInerny. He has since written the music for 74 Seconds, the MPR podcast about the shooting of Philando Castile as well as the series Flyover with Kerri Miller.
In 2016, Wilson and Jensen moved to North Minneapolis, where he is the director of catering sales for Breaking Bread and they had their son Ezra James. Wilson describes his musical career has “not exactly having both feet in,” preferring to remain grounded over the grind of chasing musical dreams.
We caught up with Wilson over coffee and later at a gig at the Sonic Salon in South Minneapolis.
Story and photos by David Pierini Staff Reporter
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
While you were growing up, was becoming a musician something on the horizon for you? Did you see it coming? Always. My dad is a drummer so I grew up with him performing regularly around the Twin Cities. He was in a blues band when I was young and when I was junior high age, he ran a 10-piece soul band called Box of Soul and they rehearsed in our basement. I was learning saxophone... and occasionally they would invite me to to jump in for a couple of songs during gigs. I grew up with soul music, funk music, R and B, blues… Music was always my big extra curricular.
How would you rank those years in terms of your growth as a musician? Pretty high up there. That was a big musical influence for sure as far as being a saxophone player at the time. I was also in jam bands where there was room for a saxophone.
After you graduated from Bard College in 2006, did you go right to New York City to embark on a performance career? I stayed up there for two years I was playing in a band, working in a restaurant and working at a school for kids with developmental disabilities as a teacher’s assistant. I ended up applying to grad school and NYU to study for a masters in music therapy. I was in school for another two years. I got to the point where I had to do an unpaid internship while trying to figure out how to survive in New York City. I didn’t know if I wanted to do music to earn a living exclusively and that is what you kind of have to do as a music therapist, moving between hospitals and private services, trying to hustle to make a living. I have always had an aversion to my creative energy having to be used to feed myself and survive, so I went (to school) part-time and then took time off. I never went back. That was 2010. It’s really interesting work and something I haven’t ruled out finishing.
What did you do musically after leaving NYU? That was the other catalyst for stopping school. I was getting inspired by contemporary singer-songwriters. That unleashed this whole new passion in me. I stopped playing saxophone and dove into being proficient on guitar, enough to sing and write songs. So I started a band with two friends from Bard, an upright bass player and drummer, and my now-wife Hannah. The band was called Jus Post Bellum. We did that for the next five years.
How would you categorize the music of Jus Post Bellum? The music seems to have elements of jazz and folk music. We ended up playing on the folk-Americana circuit because that was what was happening at the time in New York. Zach and Daniel, the drummer and bass player studied jazz with me and my approach was pretty loose so there was an improvisatory feel. The concept for the band… was this idea of post bellum America, diving into the racial dynamics of that time and writing songs with fictional narratives around those happenings. Some call it historical fiction. I would take different stories and personal things that inspired me and feed them into songwriting . It was emotionally cathartic to put that out there. I think it resonated with people because it felt real. It gave me a chance to deal with race personally, deal with race in a historical and contemporary context. I like to write music with a dark contexts that is still approachable for people.
What was life in the band like? In New York, it’s hard if you want a certain quality of life. Gigs in New York don’t pay enough so you have to tour, put out records and all that. We did to a degree, but not on a cycle that you would need to support yourself. We recorded a couple of albums, and toured a handful of times. It was always cool finding where the music resonated with people, particularly in the southern part of the county. It was fun. We didn’t lose money but we didn’t really make money. You really have to be invested in playing many nights a week and traveling the majority of the year, You can only play so many shows in your town, so you have to be on the road a lot to do that. I like it in short bursts but I’m a homebody, a real nester.
Was there a moment where you and Hannah paused and asked yourselves, “What do we do now?” I grappled with that a lot. The band was my baby and Hannah maintained a solid career path while I was working on music and trying to figure out if that what I was going to do. We had a lot of those conversations leading right up to when we moved back to Minneapolis.
What made you decide to move? I had lived in New York since 2002. I loved living in Brooklyn but you do see the divide when you move into that phase of your life where, "I want to buy a house and have a kid..." You see that perpetual hustle and wheel you’re going to be on just to stay in New York. More and more, we we were craving a different scene. We didn’t have to live in New York to do what we’re doing.
How did things end with the band? With New York? [The band] had tapered off. Hannah and I started doing more duo shows. It was also really nice and liberating because it was just the two of us. It was sort of an off ramp from what we’ve been doing.
Did you have a plan in mind for music when you moved back to Minnesota? I didn’t really know. During the last couple of years in New York, I started doing the podcast thing and scoring side projects, performing solo and feeling that was viable to do and fulfill me.
Like his parents, including his mother Hannah Jensen, left, Ezra James was born to a musical mother and father
How did you get into scoring podcasts? That was totally random. The first podcast was Terrible, Thanks for Asking. Nora [McInerny] was a family friend of Hannah’s. Her husband Aaron, who became the subject of her first podcast, died of brain cancer. They were fans of ours. We sang at their wedding and then, a couple of years later, we sang at his funeral. He liked our music so that became part of their story. She started this podcast and asked if I would be interested in writing the theme music. It turned out to be a popular show and that looped me into producers and NPR and subsequent podcasts that have come along since then.
What is the process of scoring a podcast? I ask about the tone of the story and what emotion they want from the music. There’s a short intro to the show. The voice will come in and out and music will play underneath it. It’s interesting, you have to have something that sets the tone quickly, builds to an emotional dynamic and can be cut really succinctly so that it doesn’t feel real jarring or be distracting to the voice. [But] you also want it to be memorable.
Did the music for the podcast "74 Seconds" allow you to draw on the material you did with the band? I was still writing about racism and tragedy but it was present day. It was easy to channel that sadness. That happened two months after we moved back here. It was really strange waking up in a new city, thinking we left New York where Eric Garner happened and now we’re here and Philando Castillo is this other national story.
What are you doing now that brings you personal satisfaction? I am working on new saxophone music for the first time in a while. Recently, I have had the desire to create a different emotional experience that is not reliant on words or the vulnerable performance of your voice. I am experimenting with a kind of minimalism, harmonic layers, walls of sound. They are longer pieces. It is not jazz but if I have the urge, I can always throw some improvisational riffs over the top. I’m still finding my way one piece at a time.
At the age of 35, how do you feel about the creative life you’ve lead thus far? I feel really lucky that I’ve had opportunities without having to always pursue things. Recounting it all, there has been a lot of serendipity. I don’t know if I feel like it’s still early or the majority of my music has happened already. I feel like I will play forever.